Embodied Breath Tribe

WHOA, THAT WAS CRAZY. Please read for important updates. Thank you. ❤️

Hello dear one, As we close out the week, the first quarter of 2019, and a mercury retrograde, it is clear to me that my life and how I run it is changing. For the better. It affects you if you want increased opportunities to access to my content, work, and what's next. #nextlevel

Back story....

Here's what I know: If you follow your Soul, you are in consistent initiation. We can call these "invitations to grow" in nice-speak. It can be like that or it can be an ass kicking.

I have a pact with my Soul that I honor it. I had no idea what this would truly mean in terms of some hard learning! I was always willing to do the deep thing. The speed at which I learned about what was unresolved in me in 2018 was like a firehose to the face.

2018 was a RIDE and my first year of full time entrepreneurialship outside of my education career. The launching of Embodied Breath was so sacred, and my soul lead me here, but now looking back, I see that I was in fear so much of that first year. It began with massive falling away of the old with some difficult lessons.

I was leaving behind a career that I'd built an incredible resume in. I was running a school with some of the most innovative approaches to Autism and Education integrated in a therapeutic model. I was giving that all up and had to consciously and consistently allow myself to own more and more parts of me that I had kept hidden and kept out of my work as an educator. For example, all reiki and Priestess craft! Integration of my whole self and my whole Soul mission was necessary. This was a wild and necessary process of honoring my whole Truth, as I understand it to this point.

Universe was like: Get ALL of you on board!!! My ego was like: But what does that safely look like??? (Because egos like safety.)

A good friend says, "There's no courage without fear." He also says, "Scared and Sacred are only two letters swapped." I take this to mean that right on the other side of our courage when we are scared is the Sacred. Our Sacred Mission.

And if you don't have fear, actually, you're either bullshitting yourself or you're hiding. Because authentic living is fucking scary.

You might have a heart's desire, and you might have a business idea, but if this is your true and actual calling and you dare to answer it, initiation is the name of the game. Because I can not offer what I'm meant to offer if I haven't touched it, or been willing to touch it. Courage is required.

It's like the Universe asking, "Are you sure? Let's see if you're for real."

On the last day of 2018, I spoke a truth that resulted in the end of a soul-level relationship that had required incredible risk in the first place, resulting in incredible trial. I don't really want to talk about it anymore because I don't want to stay in that energy anymore (choice), but this is to say, that's where I've been the last three months. Inside the examination of the Core Wound that that tapped.

Soul Searching. Diving those depths. Thankfully, I've authentically resurfaced, and not without some real self-examination, I promise you. (See blog for more examination of the depths if you want to take the time to read about my life. And bless you if you want to spend your time that way.)

I was pissed that I was learning about relationship and men one more time in the examination of the rubble. Sad for the loss and sad for how we all struggle collectively with what I was experiencing. I'm still standing before God and asking to integrate what has happened here, for the greater good. I was so mad at this man for doing what I judged as walking away and he said, "Use this, use any of this." I took that to mean, use it for my work. Honestly - I didn't want to have to! I was having a hissy fit in response to the non-preferred conditions. My resilient woman self was tired in deep ways. I didn't want to study men from the standpoint of disconnection anymore. But then I realized with a foot-stomping humility that I am also saying to God, "Use me." So integrate it I must. Right now, I have the willingness to examine it all through love and to move on allowing for integration of even all that is hard, but I don't have answers. And that's maybe all I need. I trust it's all happening according to a bigger plan.

An open and loving heart. Asking the deep questions. Willing to come back to the heart of the mystery.

I'm in.

And the way this all broke me open in everything it touched, combined with where I am on my Soul's journey, really has resulted in something quite beautiful.

A courageous heart, a boundaried life, and embodied Soulful woman. I'm smiling, I'm connecting, I'm shaking the fear and inviting the sensual back into my body. I am so grateful for where I am, the depth of the exploration I've touched, and the soulful encounters I've had on this leg of the journey. Life is rich. In the intimacy of the space we touch when we are willing to be real and vulnerable with one another, we touch what is most real. And, to be very clear, it's hard as fuck, this path. (Enter that is why I coach for a living - to offer this depth of support to YOU!)

In the rubble, we are given the opportunity to see ourselves laid bare and decide if we like ourselves there. We stop pretending. We sit with the ego. We have little else to prove. We have the choice to pretend or commit fully to an authentic life. I've chosen the latter.

This was life inside the uplevel. Inside the initiation.

And here are the changes on the other side:

❤️ I am diversifying my offerings to make some of them more affordable but also simultaneously strengthening the core of my work. (See below.)

❤️ I am sick of Facebook feeds, lost time & energy spent on distraction, and bullshit comments. I want real conversations. I want solution-finding. I want raw and real and gritty.

❤️ I want to pull together this tribe of people saying to me often: "I know the time is now to balance the feminine and masculine. How do we do it?"

❤️ I have SO much to say but I am not satisfied with doing that here anymore. I am NOT currently motivated to put that on FB because it gets lost, trolls are real energy sucks, and the engagement is inconsistent.

❤️ I value my abilities and content, and I am now simultaneously more generous and more willing to expect reciprocity for my contributions. This is self-worth. There is a distinct and important difference between generosity and giving oneself away energetically.

❤️ I want to hone the quality of what I contribute so that it is always worth your time.

❤️ I want you to benefit from my actual work more easily. #soulmission

❤️ I want to get gritty with real people who want to hold the inquiry about how to build the bridge between masculine & feminine. How to heal our bodies through our traumas and into the connection humans crave. How to heal gender-associated cultural ills. How to love ourselves in body & spirit.

Therefore! Structurally and energetically:

🌙 I am launching a membership program next week! This is where the BULK of my content will go. I am going to LOAD YOU UP with quality content, interviews, conversation starters about ALL THINGS Embodied Breath, bimonthly coaching calls, instructional videos, meditations, masculine/feminine, and more. It will be affordable, and you will be seriously compensated for your investment there, and you will also be contributing toward this woman's valuable work in the world. 😉 Thank you.

🌙 This is also where my energy will go first. No longer to FB feed. No longer writing for free for others' groups.

🌙 You need to be on my email list, too, for juicy stuff. Again, less on the FB feed. #tribe Go to my website and sign up.

🌙 More group options, because holy alchemy happens there. (Women's Truth group forming to begin 4/4.)

🌙 And... allowing myself to step more fully, with more dedication than ever, into my soul mission of serving relationships and conscious union. I needed to step away for a bit because projection is a real risk as humans and I was working out my shit! I needed to allow for integration, and now I can come back to this service, knowing ever-more deeply the necessity of this work, being divinely guided to do it. We need to be able to connect even through our fear and do the work of evolving into greater Union through conscious relating. Through evolutionary love. It's the only way.

Questions? Suggestions? Recommendations? Pop a comment below. Thank you for reading this far and thank you for supporting. Any comment below is welcome. If you want membership site info, comment "I'm In!" Below.

A Soul Truth Unfolds

Your Truth does not have to be prettyFlow sweetlyOr be packaged neatly

Your Truth may spit at firstStumbleGet stuck on the grit of things still working their way through to grace

Your Truth does not have to be polishedOr perfectly presentedOr pleasing Because, woman, you have done the pleasing. And in your meekness, A meekness you didn't even intend,In your efforts to not upset, To avoid reactionYou know you’ll always find you haven’t claimed all you know to be true about a thing.

Systemic oppression of women’s voices lives in your throat and mine.

And I wish we could say we’ve overcome it And goodness knows I’ve been tryingBut when My Truth I holdProved to be powerful enough this past yearThat before I knew it, I had become a threat to three men close to me And they had each threatened to sue me to subdue my story, I know that we have not.

Two of them wanted full access to my body, But they were not okay with me having full access to my story For fear that I might share what happened and how they saw themselves there.

A fear of betrayal that projected fear unsafely onto meUnwarrantedWithout justification other than I speak TruthTo cover up their behavior They made me the enemy

Men who said they loved me and I believe they did, who knew my childWho once planned a future with meThreatened my security

And I don’t know physical abuseBut I know the effect of betrayal and threat of survival as it takes hold of a woman’s bodyTo allow men trust and access to be seen as the threat And then directly oppressed,I know the silence that comes from such threatAnd I know it’s taken me three months to find the courage to break it. This time.

Or maybe it was a lifetime. Or maybe it was more.

And I know that some women never do break it.So that’s why I do. So that you can give yourself permission to be messy too.

When a woman’s Truth is something others prefer not to hear, and they can’t bear to think of the true things you might say, they seek to control the woman.

I know this because I am a truth teller and so I would be challenged this way. I am done with the karma that allowed me to get into situations Where my Truth could be subdued Never Again.My Truth, My Body, My Words, My Choice.

But there are more subversive threats of silence, women, Some self inflictedSome from other women

What are yours?

This is not newThis is embeddedAnd we are breaking cycles now

And don't pretend that if you've allowed yourself to raise your voiceYou are somehow living your whole Truth We are all walking this still.

Women are walking this disentanglement still.

The default of silence or fear of suppression affects how we even know our own Truth.How we access it at allSuch that we don’t even know ourselves as well as we could.

As a woman I know how my voiceLodges in my throatHow my Truth stagnates if I don’t free itHow it has been rarely asked for or respected in this lifetime

I know my father won’t have a relationship with me because I’ve chosen to tell my story.

I know what it is to be a professional and to have the qualifying letters behind my name and still lack the confidence to speak my Truth as I see it in a room of men.I know the way men can choose not to listen to a womanOr disconnect wisdom when presented in a woman’s tone.

I know how boys hear male voices differently, regardless of what is being said.

I know what it’s like to assume that all wisdom will fail you When the spotlight comes onTo choke on your own self doubt

To watch men with less to say Say more and say it clearer and earn more And with the confidence handed them with their privilege, To wonder what it would be like to unleash my Voice in the same confident way. All I have inside me to say.

I imagine that it would be a force powerful enough to shift the tides, Women’s voices confident as we rise.

I am a thirty eight year old woman who has questedMy entire lifeTo lend myself personal permission to live in my own Truth,And I still know every single one of these things and more to be true. The reasons we deny our own Truth.I still know the fear of pissing someone off. Of being perceived as emotional first Dismissed entirelyOf sending the imperfect email full of raw request And Truth as I see it And fearing in my entire being of another of his disconnected, hurtful replies.

Such that I nearly immediately apologize for being messy.

And then I watch that apology and that fear and that inability to speak my Truth and be heard and I think, Oh. Oh. Oh woman, stop speaking to deaf ears.

Our Truth, Women, does not have to sound pretty. It does not have to be pretty.

It can be unclearUnformedWindingEmotionalExploratoryRawLiberatingSensitiveMessyInappropriateCuttingAngry

You get to be angryTo tell an angry TruthAnd it would not surprise me if you’ve never allowed your rage to speakBecause where could you?Did you even think to?We can hold it for you now. With you. Beside you.

Your Truth does not have to be sweetYou have enough reasons that it wouldn’t be.

All the permissions are yours nowYou get to have your Truth, know it, claim it, speak it when the time is right. YOU DECIDE.

You decide to give yourself the permissionTo untame the Truth of yourselfTo claim the truth of your body and storyTo open your entire being WIDE.

❤️

If you give yourself this permission now, and it feels aligned, I am inviting you to participate in a Women's Truth Activation online circle. We begin 4/4. You will own and gain your Truth here in this safe, powerful, beautiful container. Connect with me. You know what to do when it is time to rise.

Adoption decades later

When I called my mother from ten hours away during my first semester of college and told her I was pregnant, she let out a sound so guttural, so raw, that I’m pretty sure my father probably thought someone had died. Telling your mother you’re pregnant when you’re supposed to be a kid going off to college, well, that’s shame inducing.

Going home from college pregnant after the first semester at age 18; that’s shame inducing. Going back to the small town, back to the place you wanted to get away from in the first place, back to the methodist-infused judgement, literally growing evidence of your lust in your belly.

Shame shuts down things like lust and sexuality. Shame shuts down most things and makes rule-followers, hustlers, vigilant watchers out of us.

There was an Indigo Girls song, “Fugitive,” that I listened to in my old boxy black Jeep Cherokee on repeat that fall while I was packing up from the college I was ashamed to be leaving, an innovative hippie school in Western North Carolina. The song started with the words “I’m harboring a fugitive, defector of a kind, and she lives in my soul, and drinks of my wine, and I’d give my last breath, just to keep us alive.”

I listened to the song again just now and cried my eyes out. Happens every time I play it.

I carried that little fugitive. Or I was the fugitive, or we were, I’m not sure. I put my head down, let the other adults duke it out, and I grew that girl. I knew she had to be here. I knew this mess was somehow the most sacred thing I’d ever experienced.

I cared for her like the doctors told me to, and I also discovered, somehow following my instincts, Ina May Gaskin and Caroline Myss and Christiane Northrup. On my 18th birthday, I went to a small diner in rural PA with my grandmother, visibly pregnant, and meanwhile Ina May Gaskin was on my nightstand. Actually I didn’t have a nightstand. I had a bookshelf behind the head of a twin sized bed that was put in the basement for me when I came back from college. A bed in the basement was also shame inducing. I’d revisit that in therapy to unpack more than once in the subsequent decades.

But I found god in that bed, with that baby in my belly. Rather, now, I think I found my own Soul and Mary Magdalene and Sophia. I touched the Sacred. I knew my child’s Soul. I felt her so deeply. I knew her personality. There is nothing she has ever done that has surprised me, because I knew her that deeply. But I actually only got to see her grow up in pictures and twice a year visits if I was lucky. She was adopted three days after her birth.

I knew my job was to get her through. I just knew it with the knowing that I now call Soulknowing - when you don’t know how you know other than you know it in your core. She was meant to be here. She chose to come through me. There was only one family I would have chosen out of three states worth of families looking to adop through that agency. I chose them a few months before her birth, so I knew where she would be going. I didn’t know what it would look like. I couldn’t predict. And yet, I knew she would be okay.

When you’re laying there in a solo twin bed at 18 and pregnant, and you find a different kind of God than the god you’d been given, the god that made you go to church and the god that shamed you for being a lustful woman in the first place, you find faith. Or I did anyway. But faith is a different story. It goes hand in hand with this story, but this story is about shame.

I found God (or Sophia or Mary Magdalene or my Soul - whatever She was) and I put all that faith into that divine little baby, and then when I had handed her over, what does a girl filled with so much shame do? She kicks her own ass.

The prescription we’re all given, as women, is to make something of ourselves. I pause here because I don’t think I need to actually even say more about this to women who have read this far in this post. You know the pressures, teenage pregnancy or not. Women know the conflicts. We know the narratives. We know that the path of achievement can derail us from our Soul real damn quick and real deep if we’re not careful. And sadly, we don’t know to be careful. Because the inherent prescription looks and sounds like, “succeed at all costs, the answers are outside of yourself, go prove you are good enough.” And then we lose our Soul, or disconnect from it further, or don’t even know what we’ve lost, we just know it’s something big.

Gaining back one’s Soul is the work of a lifetime. Following one’s Truth is the work of a lifetime.

I’ve been walking back to myself, on a windy road, for nearly twenty years. Thankfully, I didn’t stop looking under the rocks on the path. I also worked like hell to prove myself and prove achievement and prove prove prove prove prove prove prove my worth.

Because nothing strips self love and self worth like shame. And nothing ever fills a hole when shame dug it in the first place. And we don’t ever prove a damn thing if what we really want is to love ourselves and feel worthy just to be alive.

You have to choose yourself. You have to choose your Soul. You have to get it back, and this is an active choice. Others will not understand this choice when you start to choose it. It looks like rule-breaking. The further you go, the more it looks like crazy, in my experience.

This choice will not make sense and will go against the grain and you will be misunderstood and you will have to confront all of the parts of yourself you never wanted to even admit were parts of yourself and you will have to claim claim claim claim claim your own Soul.

I want to say this again. YOU will have to choose you. Mom and Dad and husbands and bosses and friends turned not friends and lovers turned not lovers will never do for you what this active choice to choose yourself will do for you. It is not selfish, to know yourself. It is not unimportant.

It is so important. It is what leads you to be so damn fine with yourself that you have nothing but integrity. And when you make a mistake, finally you learn to recognize the sabotager of shame and you embrace it, you embrace you, you apologize, you get right with yourself, you decide what parts of yourself you’ll judge and what you’ll forgive and fix and you’ll do your best. The fight, the need to prove, the incessant running from shame - these things only lead to more fights, more combativeness between us and life.

I recently had another deep bout with shame. Thankfully, shame came to be a teacher, as emotions and conditions do. I know that many people worry that they will lose themselves to these unpleasant emotions. You will not lose yourself if you continue to choose yourself, and continue to ask for growth.

I sat with shame, this teacher, and I saw how it had always been there, under the surface, whispering in my ear that maybe I wasn’t actually good. Wasn’t actually okay, for all my trying and all my proving.

Shame is not You, You are not shame. You are not the things that society told you were wrong but you did anyway because of your Soulknowing. There is a SoulYou to claim. You are Yours to claim. And the world needs SoulYou, not another rule follower. The world needs you Whole.

I’m going to go ahead and be radical - that’s but one of the things I’ve come to after these first intense weeks of 2019. I’m going to operate through a radical love. I’m going to tell the stories that don’t get told. Talk about sexuality and the gritty work of Soulgaining. I’m going to take leaps and do things that don’t fit the mold.

Thank God. And Sophia. And Mary Magdalene. Thank Soul. I didn’t come here to be or please anyone else. Neither did you. We came to be whole. Get after your own Soul.

As it was happening that I was developing a group opportunity for women, on Cultivating & Activating PERSONAL TRUTH for January 2019, I was carrying a Truth that I didn’t know how to share.

I didn’t even know if it was fully mine to share. I didn’t know what would happen if I were to share it, when to share it, what to do with it. So in all that confusion, I started to question the Truth itself.

Read: I questioned myself. Because Personal Truth is Self.

This Truth was handed to me by the Universe, by Source, by my Soul. I shit you not. It was the biggest Truth I had ever been handed. It was a recognition of a bigger Truth rather than something that I thought up. In other words - it just was. It blew me away. And it came in one of the most outstanding packages of unfortunate circumstances that you could imagine. This Truth changes lives.

Because I was so taken aback by this Truth, and because of its magnitude, I was unsure what to do. You can not deny a Truth like this. Actually, I will say this: I, personally, will not deny a Truth like this. One that involves my Soul. I will not. That is a vow I hold unto myself. And yet, others would not approve. This Truth is certain to evoke judgement.

Others would not approve. There I was in an old pattern of seeking that approval. I was familiar with this pattern, but sometimes it catches me off guard. I worried and focused on the impossible task of navigating this Truth in the world of others. I spent months navigating how to bring this Soul Truth into the world, attempting to do so consciously.

And then I woke up. Again.

To the pattern. Oh. I saw what I was doing. It went like this:

Know a Personal Truth

Truth is uncomfortable (I seem to have a soul contract to be a big noisy being in this world and #2 is not uncommon for me - see below.)

Look for a way to make the Truth comfortable for everyone else and feel a shit ton o’ shame and the pain of hiding for even having this Truth in the meanwhile.

But step 3 does NOT work. That’s where I was off. That’s where we commonly go wrong - the approval seeking. We know a thing so deeply inside of ourselves and then we look outside of ourselves to approve of our knowing. This is an old, patriarchal trap. And here I was in it - again.

I was looking for approval and hence seeking to prove:

I am a good person.

I am in integrity.

I am a loving person.

I hold myself accountable.

I do not ever intend to hurt others.

(These are some of my Truths. But you see, here, I was trying to prove my Truth. Ick.) There is a difference, a mighty difference, between inherently knowing your Truth and trying to prove your Truth to others.

What I was handed was a righteous, unbelievable Truth. Honestly. One day, when it is told, some of you will believe it and some of you will not.

I heard myself say at one point, “I understand that what I am asking you to believe is unbelievable.”

Another friend who both loves me and holds me accountable said to me, “Even some seers won’t be able to see this Truth.”

How do you get approval for a Truth like that?

This Truth, THIS Truth - in its gift and in all its challenge and in all its splendor - it taught me something huge. APPROVAL SEEKING FOR YOUR OWN TRUTH DOES NOT F*ING WORK. It’s like I needed the most impossible set of circumstances, sure to evoke judgement from one angle or another, to remind me, hopefully once and for all, that the approval for my Truth comes from me. In fact, it doesn’t even need approval, because it just IS. What our Personal Truth needs, is to be honored. And here I was, organizing a women’s group around Personal Truth. You see how life delivers the finest of lessons, albeit in complex packages?

Change Step 3, Sarah. You inherently know this.

3. Let your Truth be your own. Let your Truth be your Power. Let owning your Truth be your Journey. Let everyone else have their Truth (becomes everyone’s Truth is capital T). We all get to have our Truth. Your Truth is your Heart and your Soul and your Authenticity. It is You.

My friend Seppi was talking to me about the question of “What’s your kryptonite?” I’d have to say - the judgement of others.

When other people don’t like me, I have performed various tragedies of self neglect in the name of gaining approval. I have attempted to mitigate people not liking me by approval seeking. Over and over and over again.

I stand out. I just do, and I struggled with this for a long time. I tried hard to play by the rules but it didn’t work for me. I tried over and over again to get it right according to some truth (little t) outside myself.

This summer, I was at a Soul Fire retreat. It was night four and it was supposed to be a ceremony where we “married” our Soul. Well, I’d just baptized myself as Sarah Poet naked in a river and danced my ass off in a field in order to reclaim my wild feminine Soul to the degree that needed to be reclaimed on that day and I was tired. I was beat. I had just earned my Soul barefoot on the ground in the summer heat, moving body and limbs as I expelled the trauma and judgement trapped therein. And so everyone was getting showered and dressed for this ceremony - in beautiful gowns and glitter, and my Soul was like, “Eh, fuck no.” And I wore jeans and my black bikini top and put my dirty hair up under a sun hat. It was the truest thing in that moment to not wear what everyone else was wearing. And I did the back and forth of “Is this okay?” and of course it was. It just didn’t fit in. Because that’s me. Apparently I came to wear jeans to my ceremonies and fuck some shit up around here. But dear me, my heart, it gets more and more fierce the more I honor my Truth. My Truth is pure. It was always pure.

And that realization is my strength. My power. Approval seeking sucks the life out of you. I’ve done it. I’ve done it for so long, over and over, and I’ve felt the judgement of standing in my Truth, and I’ve felt the inner conflict when I denied it. Denying my Truth is actually my kryptonite. And damn it, here’s what I know.

I did NOT walk out of the hierarchical job structure of the Patriarchy and create my own empire in service to raising consciousness on this planet in order to find myself once again in that shit-eating Patriarchal pattern of approval seeking from powers outside of myself. We’ll do it to ourselves if we allow it.

I did NOT walk out of a job just last year where one day my male boss shamed me, in a leadership position, in front of my peers as if I was a little girl and in a way he would never have spoken to a man, demanding subordination, in order to go unseen now. Fuck no. FUCK no.

I did NOT give away a baby to adoption as a young woman who believed I wasn’t enough to raise her child and spend the subsequent fifteen years realizing the myth of inadequacy in my bones so that I could stay silent when things get uncomfortable now. In fact, quite the opposite.

I did NOT walk the path of my Soul to get here and then deny my Truth because it’s difficult to walk it. No. I walk it.

Shoo. You feeling me?

I will have any conversation, I will face anything, I will consider, I will love. I will live my TRUTH.

But I will not go quietly, silently denying my own Truth. The time for that is over. That is why I am here. I now allow my Truth to be mine. I stand tall. I take in the energy of fearing my kryptonite, fearing a loss of approval, and I turn that energy inward. My Truth fills my Heart. In fact, my Truth comes from my Heart. This Truth makes me who I am. It allows me to take ALL of the energy that I leak when I’m in approval seeking, and that then becomes the energetic embers of my inner fire.

Approval seeking is dead to me. You may or may not approve, and loves, I do not care.

That’s not an insult. In fact, if you can see it, it’s empowering AF. I support you in whatever your Truth is as well. You WANT me to be fully in my Truth, fully supporting yours. We each need this for and from one another. Because our Truth is heartfelt.

Because when I am in my Truth, I love you more.

Because when I am in my Truth, I honor yours.

Because in order for me to know and honor my Truth, I have to know my Heart.

And I will not deny my Heart.

Let us be unwavering.

Let us be stoking our own fire, so that we can stoke the fire of the world.

Your truth is not about anyone else. If you are directing even a portion of your energy toward approval seeking, or hell, giving or denying approval, take it back.

This is your life force.

Your Truth is your life force.

If you are denying your Truth, you are staying smaller than you are meant to be. You know I’m right. I know I’m right because I did it. I did it when I wanted to leave that job and was scared to. I did it when I wrote the letter addressing the problem and was dismissed from the job and felt deep shame for all the disapproval. I did it when I let my baby go. I did it when I knew how to yell but not how to speak from the heart. I did it when I stayed married, hell, when I got married.

I denied my Truth a million times, because that is what we’re taught to do as women.

And I have also regained it, now no less than a million times.

It has been the walk of my lifetime, honoring my Truth. I am here to support you doing the same.

We learn to hear it, then we figure out how we want to honor it. It is all your choice. Just do not deny it.

I am here. Embers are burning. 20 women. We begin this sacred circle January 4.

I got my first tattoo in a friend’s basement. I don’t think my mother knows that to this day. It was a simple butterfly, that I had drawn, with women’s lib symbols in the wings. I was 17...When I was in my late twenties, I covered that tattoo on my left shoulder with three large poppies. And, the guy doing the cover up thought it would be a nice ode to the old self to include a new butterfly. I’m glad we did...Just a year later, I got the peony on the other shoulder. My mother’s original rules for a tattoo were that I could only get one where no one could see it if I needed to cover it up for a job. So I was thirty two years old, a school principal, with largely inked shoulders. They barely showed...That same year, I was taking a tarot class on the side, trying to remember my intuition as a woman. I was a school principal that constantly lead with heart and was constantly “too much.” Criticized for taking intuitive leaps. Ha ha ha, the wild witch awake in me now laughs. My intuition is my craft. But I didn’t know it then. Where is a woman to find this until she nurtures it back to life in herself...I was always nervous. But a badass. I WAS a badass, authentically, I just always felt I had to fight for it, or fight, period, for me. My nervous system was fighting for safety my whole life and I was the intuitive woman following the rules of successful engagement, but never feeling myself. For example hiding these tattoos that were authentic expression...And so I was in this tarot class and something happened and I realized, holy shit, I’ve given myself armor. I have given myself self-protective, black, badass, don’t fuck with me armor. How’s that for #resiliency.😉..I love my tattoos. But I don’t want armor and I don’t need protection. Not anymore. So I just kept decorating my body with more and more expression, letting out more and more skin, leaving the profession and creating a life that is 100% my own creation. My next tattoo is on the way. I’ll show it to you.❤️

As a nineteen year old woman, I laid in a hospital bed just having given birth to my first child. I was holding her and keenly aware of all of the other eyes on me. Our relationship, the depth and authenticity of it, happened in silence, in the psyche, in the womb. Judgement and shame existed outside of this space.

This child of mine was strong and robust in spirit and in all of her nine pounds three ounces. She was a deep thinker, wise and attuned to the Universe. I knew this because we spent countless silent hours together while she took up residence in me, while I took up residence in my parent’s basement, where a little nook had been created for me after I came home from my first semester of college pregnant. I knew how she would move about the world before she even came into it. There is still nothing about her personality that surprises me to this day. I knew her then. The gift of deep, soulful insight given to a woman who knows she will not raise her child.

Her adoptive parents picked her up at the hospital less than 48 hours after her birth, according to the time stamp on the photos I have in an album. I thought it had been longer, but she was born just after midnight on the 22nd, and they came the evening of the 23rd. During the time I had her in the hospital, a steady stream of visitors came. It was sweet of everyone, and I’m sure I invited it, appreciative of the level of support of close friends and family. But I was silent while the world moved around me.

I was smiling for these damn pictures when I should have been asking for quiet time alone with her. Indeed, I stayed up all night long studying her, talking to her, making agreements, making amends, making apologies.

Her face was perfectly round, she was pure beauty. Pure perfection. I had done it right - the pregnancy. I had followed all rules, but beyond that, I had read Ina May Gaskin and I had nurtured myself and my pregnancy with a wisdom that was both beyond my years and not present physically in the influences that surrounded me. I tucked away in that basement, waitressing and taking a few classes otherwise, and I listened to the experience. I felt it. I talked to her, and to God, and I didn’t even think I believed in anything like that. I’d run adamantly from the church at the age of 16, which was when my father finally cut me loose from obligatory attendance. My rejection of the Methodist Christianity in which he partook and we accompanied every Sunday began long, long before. However, he made me go until I was sixteen. Looking back, I’d say that was generous of him. I’m surprised he didn’t make it longer. But he did continue to warn me of the hell I’d burn in for decades to come.

So I didn’t want God, I didn’t ask for it, and I don’t even know that that was what I found there in that basement, solo with my baby in my belly. But I did find faith, enough that I sent it with her as her middle name. Anna Faith.

But her parents named her Phoebe and I negotiated that Anna had to stay with her, so that became her middle name, and Faith was dropped. I also forgot about faith for quite a few years, as a concept. I stopped believing in what I’d discovered there, and thought it was up to me to go make something of myself after the pregnancy. Do you know this kind of striving? It’s perpetual, unrelenting. You imagine that you can control the outcome by performing well enough, but that’s a recipe for disaster.

I’ll have to dig a little deeper to remember the true discoveries of faith that happened then, but it was significant. I understood that I was fulfilling some sort of role, bringing her through. I knew that it was in her best interest, ultimately, to live in a family ready to provide a life for her free of struggle. I was living in my parents’ basement for God’s sake. With me, she would struggle. I struggled. I told myself, “Look what a failure you are. Look at your surroundings. Where is the crib going to go?” But mostly, I didn’t want her raised under that roof of my parents. I knew that to be true. I felt powerless. It was a familiar feeling.

There was no door on the room I slept in in the basement, and in the mornings, I’d hear my parents in the shower, and my dad would walk down the basement steps to get his clothing naked. Yelling, “Don’t look!”

I’m still working on the words to describe the feeling of combined disgust, defeat, being overpowered, and constant sickening that I still feel when I think of being a young woman in a basement, growing her daughter, cut off from her lover, forced to turn her head so as to not see her father’s dick flouncing by.

But you get me. I’ll find all the words by the time the book is written.

Flash forward to now. I’m thirty seven. I’m diving back into this story to write this memoir, and I’m looking at the topic of self worth, that fucking thing that plagues so many women. Lack of self worth.

Recently, I’ve been in multiple circles of women who are building businesses, as am I, and here’s what I’m noticing. 1. High frequency of women going it alone, doing that perpetual striving thing. And I wonder, is this still the same game we’re playing with ourselves? 2. High frequency of powerful women not asking for help while striving. And I wonder, would we turn our heads now if our father walked by insisting to be naked? I for one would tell him to go the fuck away. I am also better at asking for help, though there’s still the silence of not speaking up when I need something, too. 3. High frequency of powerful women struggling to actually make a lot of money in their business, or even enough money. And I wonder, what is it about women’s self worth because I am looking around at powerful-ass women, myself included, and the money needs to be in women’s hands. (Seriously, PSA, support some women-owned businesses right this very minute.)

So I do, I look at where my self worth went down the tubes, if the tubes were ever full to begin with, which I don’t believe they were. And today, I had an Aha. A major AHA.

As I looked at these photos of a younger me, holding a child in a hospital bed, I realized something. Me, then, was looking at my first child, this perfect child, this daughter of flesh and body created of the resources of my body, this promise to the world, and I simultaneously believed myself unworthy of her. Clearly, and that’s why adoption. As I looked at the greatest love, the only thing I longed for, I was reminding myself that I wasn’t worthy of her.

I want you but I can’t have you, I’m sorry. I fucked up.

I was making promises, saying apologies, and those sounded something like, “I’m setting you up for something better than I can give you. I’m sorry that I fucked this up and this is how you’re starting your life. I love you. I’ve been talking to the stars and you’re cared for, little one, have faith.”

She gets it. The adoption was always open, and I see her now at least once a year, with the geographical distance between us. She just gets it, no grudges that I can detect. She’s appreciative. Tells me she loves me, how lucky is that. She’s healthy.

And I’m thirty seven, a mother of a beautiful son, a home owner, a business creator, a healer, and I love my life. And all the time, still, fucking still, I struggle to accept that I am worthy of the beauty that I am looking at, and worthy of all the beauty I still do desire. And I do not, anymore, want to hold it at arm’s length. I want to welcome it all in, now more than ever. All of it.

Because here’s the thing we’re not taught to say as women, but it’s the thing I know and attempt like hell to embody now: I am worthy of it all.

I was worthy then, I am worthy now.

You were worthy then. You are worthy now.

Things just got a little fucked up along the way.

(The spacing of this blog post is also fucked up. It just is that way sometimes. We roll with it.)

If you pause and notice, when you look at this picture, what is your reaction? You are free to share below, but only after you have reflected on what I am about to say.

Whatever your reaction, it is about you.

If you want to congratulate me for standing in my power, it is about you.

If you want to shame me for standing in my power, it is about you.

If you want to put me down and imagine that I am not in my power, it is about you.

If you feel threatened by my power, it is about you.

If you want to fuck me in my power, it is about you.

Do you want to go toward or run from?

Does your heart open or restrict?

This is information about you.

As I step further and further into my sovereignty, the projections are fascinating.

As I show up as a sovereign woman with something of value to offer, some have a personal need to exert power-over knowledge.

My power is fucking beautiful. It is mine. I am happy to share it, but you have to come with your own clear heart. I’ll meet you there. I’ll inspire you there. I will listen to you there. I promise you, I will be as clear as I have ever been and you may not have met many like me before. But if you bring your projections, love, I’ll have to call you on it. Because I just won’t hold them anymore.

I am here to love and to live in truth. I am here to honor my soul and to be of service to you as you do the same.

How we each react to the “other” is but a reflection of ourselves. As we learn to open to this way of living, we notice and observe how we tend or need to respond to how others show up.

Notice that reaction, and notice what it’s here to ultimately teach you. I am over here watching my own, I promise you.